Don’t freak out about empathic chatbots. Learn from them.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. You’re in a pinch. After pausing your career for several years to start a family, it’s time to go back to work, but you feel rusty, unmotivated and anxious about re-entering the job market.

You post about your troubles online and two strangers reply: Stranger 1: I’m sorry to hear that you’re struggling with finding the motivation to get back to work. I can understand how anxiety and insecurity can make it hard to take that step. You have a lot of courage to share your situation and seek help.

I hope you know that you have valuable skills and experience that can benefit any employer. You deserve to feel financially secure and fulfilled in your career. Stranger 2.

I’ve struggled with the same problem. The best way to tackle it is to just jump right in and give it your best. Which stranger seems more compassionate, attentive and wise? Who would you choose as a confidant? Researchers have been asking people these very questions to rate strangers’ responses to emotional situations.

The trick: Some responses come from humans, others from chatbots, but the raters don’t know which is which. The result? Over and over, humans say the most empathetic stranger—in this case stranger 1—is a bot. A 2023 study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that patients with a medical concern preferred a chatbot’s response to a physician’s nearly 80% of the time.

Another study published in the journal Communications Psychology this year found that people consistently found a chatbot more compassionate than trained hotline crisis responders. Large language models (LLMs) are doing a better job than humans at making people feel seen and heard. This phenomenon, which we can call LLMpathy, is both stunning and